


Ash and Blood and Bone

by IntoTheRiverStyx



Category: Arthurian Mythology
Genre: Alternate Universe - Steampunk
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:33:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25061668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IntoTheRiverStyx/pseuds/IntoTheRiverStyx
Summary: AfterThe Prydwinwas shot down, a trail of smoke and fire her only send-off, the last of the rebellion was thought to have died with her.A small group of survivors is determined not to let their cause die. They know the value of anger and persuasion. They know the odds they're facing.Grit and faith will have to be enough to see them through.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 7





	1. Still Here

He was going to die. Everyone he had ever loved in any capacity was going to die.

This was something everyone knew, that they would one day die; their time on the ground and in the air would come to a screeching halt. There may be warning, there may be no preamble. It may be a slow thing, drawn out so much all loose ends can either be tied off or burned away. It may be a quick thing, one's last moment a prayer that can only be uttered by those staring death in the face.

There were things discussed in the abstract between friends who hid their fears surrounding their mortality, by philosophers who found themselves more interested in what could not be proven than the life in front of them.

If anyone had ever spoke of what it means to die in a stolen ship, shot down from the sky, the poorly thought out interior made of treated wood acting as an accelerate, the screams of his fellow crewmen being increasingly drowned out by the roar of the flames, they had not done so in his presence.

When he'd followed his brother and his brother's ideals to something he promised would be better than the ruins of a city they'd been forced to grow up in, he'd known they'd be no better off at first. They would be joining a group of people who had more faith in actionable anger and sacrifice than in a system that promised change would come with patience.

Even then, the little training this haphazardly assembled group of rebels who hoped they could get off the ground literally and metaphorically had been able to provide him taught him the odds of dying were much higher than if he'd've walked away did not relay the horror that death in battle was.

“Agrivane!” someone too close to be looking at anything but death was yelling in his ear, pulling him along, “Agrivane, we need to move!”

He listened, obeyed, even, his legs unsure if they were still legs or something foreign, something far less practical for the mad dash at an impossible hope of escape he seemed to be being dragged towards. There was something in his lungs besides air and smoke – perhaps it was fire, somehow inside him, finding a new way to show him things he had not even been able to dream about.

He was alone, unsure when whoever it was that pulled him from frozen in the face of the flames to running, stumbling along the halls and stairwells, trying to escape to the top deck as if that would make a difference.

He was on the top deck, no memory of how he got there, how he'd climbed every step from the weapons deck to the closest thing to fresh air he could manage.

“Keep those balloons tied down!” a familiar voice rose above the chaos, “Break them down one by one! Do **not** let one deflate before the one before it is empty!”

The balloons, the fucking canvas-and-air balloons, once their ally now threatening to turn the forest they were headed for into a disaster, catching every leaf and branch as they kept crashing.

_How could a fall be this slow?_ It was an entire lifetime between realizing the ship had been hit in a way they could not recover from and now.

The balloons.

They'd kept the balloons filled as long as they could, tried to give those in the lower decks as chance to jump or find a functional personal craft and flee. Those on the top deck had looked at death and decided to meet it head-on so that others might not have to.

Agrivane knew their efforts had been in vain. 

There was another horror, this one he got to watch as it happened rather than feel the after-effects, as one of the balloons freed itself of its tethers. The ship, weighed down by the fears of dying men, the remaining balloons no longer able to offer anything resembling a slow decent.

He was going to die.

–

Pain was the second thing he registered.

The first was a weight on him, unevenly distributed and impossible to shift off of him.

The third was that everything was dark.

He took a deep breath and his lungs filled with something that burned, made him cough so violently he wondered if the fanatics were right and this was Hell.

“One over here!” a voice that was far too strong for how Agrivane felt filtered through his awareness, “Here, here!”

There was not time, only feelings that words would never fit around no matter how much hindsight he managed to acrew.

The pain blooming as the weight was removed.

His lungs feeling like they were taking in more powder – more ash and char – than air.

Worried, half-familiar voices.

A scream, one he would hear over and over for the rest of his life in his dreams and nightmares alike.

“Gawain, no,” someone said, “ we don't know if we can move him yet.”

“Don't know if we can move him yet!?” his brother's voice was full of fury and pain, “Everything is _still on fire_! We HAVE to move him!”

“The fire's on the other side of the wreckage,” the first voice – one Agrivane felt like he'd heard before – said, “If his back's broken and we move him wrong, he'll never walk again.”

“And if the fire jumps he'll never **live** again!” Gawain sounded like he was spitting as he was yelling.

More pain, less pressure from what a distant part of his mind told him was wreckage pinning him in place.

Voices, hurried but sure, directing Gawain and someone else on how to move the wreckage.

Gawain sobbing as he lifted Agrivane from the wreckage at last.

“Go find a place we can set camp,” the first voice told Gawain, “We're going to keep looking for survivors.”

Gawain's footsteps were hurried and unsure, nearly stumbling a few times.

“G'wain,” Agrivane coughed, “You don't-”

“Shut up,” Gawain said through tears, “Just. Shut up.”

Agrivane did.

–

Gawain set him down on cold, damp ground after what felt like hours. Agrivane made a hissing sound and Gawain apologized, a hurried, repetitive thing that did not fit what he knew of his elder brother.

“Where are we?” Agrivane managed to say.

“I found a cave,” Gawain made no effort to hide the fact he was still crying, “I could have gotten you killed, Aggs.”

“It's part of the risk,” Agrivane said as he tried to sit up. All he got for his efforts were a coughing fit and a firm hand on his sternum that vaguely threatened harm if Agrivane tried that again.

“I know but,” Gawain shook his head, “I thought we had a chance.”

“Maybe we still do,” Agrivane felt this reversal acutely. Gawain was the one who was always the optimist, always ready to look for what came next, “We're still here.”

“Yeah,” Gawain sniffed and scrubbed at his nose with the back of his hand, “yeah. We are.”


	2. By Chance or by Providence

By the time they had company in the cave, the sky had long gone dark. The torchlight brought a fresh wave of panic that did not settle when the one holding the torch began speaking.

Gawain looked at his brother, asleep but on his side, a sure sign he could move his entire body on his own, then looked around for anything that might serve as a weapon.

“Gawain? Agrivane?” it was a careful, fragile voice that did not fit the weapons master, “Are you in here?”

“Here,” Gawain's voice cracked in the middle of the single-syllable word, “We're here.”

“Good,” Bedivere said with a heavy exhale.

Bedivere's footfalls echoed in the cave, the soles of his boots worn or burned down to the metal reinforcement layer. Agrivane stirred at the sounds but did not wake up.

“How many?” Gawain did not know what he wanted to know – how many lived or how many died.

He'd seen those he'd spent the majority of the last three years of his life fall in front of him – flame and smoke and cannon fire claiming many, the impact claiming even more somehow.

“Five,” Bedivere said, “Kay and Arthur are still at the wreckage.” His entire affect was pained, his mock-commander jacket he and some of the others had made from a patchwork of stolen uniforms torn and covered in what looked like more than just soot.

“They're still,” Gawain's next question died in his throat and all he could ask was, “Why?”

“To bury the dead,” Bedivere sat on the floor across from Gawain and closed his eyes, “They wanted me to find where you'd taken Agrivane so we didn't lose track of you.”

“How'd you find me?” Gawain asked, “Us?”

Bedivere managed a small, self-satisfied chuckle. “You might as well have left a trail, broken plants and cracked debris piles right to the mouth of the cave.”

Gawain made a sound much further from self-satisfied.

“All of them?”

“As many as we can pull from what's left of _The Prydwin_ ,” Bedivere opened his eyes again, “Some of it's just too heavy to be moved by just five people.”

There was an unspoken horror, the knowledge that there may be more, trapped, slowly crossing from life to death as whatever wounds they sustained and dehydration took over any will they had left in them.

“We,” Gawain echoed, “Yeah, we can.”

“Sleep, for now,” Bedivere said it like either of them would be capable of it, “The shock's going to wear off and you're going to want to be asleep when it does.”

Gawain made a noise that was caught somewhere between an acknowledgment and disbelief.

–

Gawain did not sleep.

–

Seeing the wreckage the day after, the fires only embers and fresh piles of stones precariously stacked around what Gawain knew were his friends and fellow fighters, some so close together in some places that they looked to be one.

There were shallow graves in other places, dirt packed just tight enough to stay in place.

“There aren't many stones in the forest,” Arthur said as if he was reading Gawain's mind, “At least, not within carrying distance.”

Gawain nodded, grabbed a piece of wood a little longer than his arm and almost as thick as his wrist, and started using it to dig another grave.

–

When they had done all they could, Agrivane spending most of the process sitting and trying to breathe, they began walking.

–

They drank from streams and ate whatever they could trap and slept on open earth most nights, too exhausted to go any further. When Agrivane's lungs could not keep up, someone would carry him. When no one could carry Agrivane, they stopped for the day.

Gawain wondered if this was some sort of nightmare that he would wake from, startled and disoriented but still in his shared quarters on _The Prydwin._

There was no way reality could be this horrific.

–

On the sixth day, they came across a small village. A young man – maybe sixteen, barely younger than Agrivane – saw them first. He made a surprised noise and ran off.

“This could be the second-best day of my life,” Kay said as he watched the boy run off, “or the second-worst.”

“Depends on how they feel about strangers,” Arthur let out a long, loud breath, “and about the fact we are probably wearing more blood and ash than clothes.”

“Little more worried about the first part, honestly,” Bedivere crossed his arms, “If they're not receiving their food and cloth packages, they're going to run us out. If they're going to be paid to bring in any dissenters, they're going to kill us.”

“That's should have been an inside thought,” Kay informed him. 

Gawain wondered how they'd survived this long.

–

The boy returned with a man who did not look much older than the boy; Gawain could not tell if it was just his face or if the nearest authority figure was just _that young._ There was no reading his face – even his eyes seemed blank. He walked like a man who simply _commanded power_ by showing up.

“You weren't kidding,” the man told the boy, “You lot, follow me.” He turned on his heels and began heading back the way he'd come.

Gawain – and everyone else – looked to Arthur for direction. Arthur shrugged and jerked his chin at the retreating figure.

The village was spread out in a way that hid it size. It may have been a small village with more land than it needed, houses and animal pens scattered so far apart there was no clear line to what belonged to who and where one property stopped and another started. Gawain found himself looking around, his attention not on where they were going at all.

Agrivane's coughing fit brought him back into the moment.

Gawain looked sideways, tried to ask his brother silently if he'd be alright walking.

The man they were following did not look back or slow down.

–

They came to a stop at a stone-and-wood house, the stone making up the base of the walls near to Gawain's knee and trunks of fallen trees making the rest of it. The roof was thinner pieces of wood with grasses woven to cover the very top of the building, reducing the weather wear.

“In,” the man said before he and the boy disappeared inside.

Arthur followed them, shoulders squared despite his exhaustion, head up straight and eyes forward.

Gawain did his best to mimic Arthur's courage and power as he followed him inside.

Once everyone was inside and the door shut behind them, the man dropped his shoulders and smiled at them, eyes suddenly very alive.

“I see you've met my son, Galahad,” the man briefly looked to his son, “and the whole sector's been buzzing with news of the last resistance ship being taken down.”

“Sir,” Arthur began, but stopped when the man looked directly at him like he might be looking directly through Arthur's soul.

“My name is Lancelot,” the man finally introduced himself, “and I cannot tell you how relieved I am there were survivors.”


End file.
